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Conversion to Christianity

University of California Press

The conventional wisdom in the historiography of the ancient world is that the emergence of what we call civilization was marked by the rise of the state, government bureaucracy, writing, and a complex division of labor. Less widely noted, but of equal import, was the conversion of tribal and nonstate peoples to more socially expansive and doctrinally formalized religions, including those today identified as "historic" or "world" religions. For many peoples, it would appear, incorporation into a broader social order brought not just technological and political transformations of traditional lifeways but far-reaching adjustments in the canons of divinity, identity, and social ethics as well.1 Here is a development at the origins of the world we call civilized, but one about which there is surprisingly little intellectual consensus.

What makes this phenomenon all the more intriguing is that conversion to more inclusive or world religions is not just a distant event in an unknowable past but a process that continues in the backlands and barrios of the developing world today. Indeed, though empires and economic orders have come and gone, the world religions have survived. They are, we might say, the longest lasting of civilization's primary institutions. Just why this is so is an important question: it challenges our understanding of "traditional" and "world" religions, forces us to reflect on how people become converted from one form of religion to another, and shows how deeply religious reformation is implicated in the making of the modern world.

This world-building aspect of religious conversion is the focus of the essays in this volume. All examine the twin phenomena of Christian conversion and Christianization—the reformulation of social relations,cultural meanings, and personal experience in terms of putatively Christian ideals. Though studies of conversion have traditionally privileged its psychology (or, all too often, a reification of that psychology),2 the authors of these essays explore Christian conversion in its full complexity—sociological and historical, cultural and psychological. Rather than elevate the individual experience of conversion above the social world, they examine how social and individual processes interact over time. The studies reveal that conversion takes many forms. Not always an exclusivistic change of religious affiliation requiring the repudiation of previously held beliefs (Nock 1933), conversion assumes a variety of forms because it is influenced by a larger interplay of identity, politics, and morality.

A second characteristic of these studies is that they explore Christianity as a world religion rather than as a uniquely Eurocentric one.3 This cross-cultural focus speaks to the reality of Christianity in the premodern and modern eras and to how it has shaped our world. It highlights what is distinctive about Christian conversion and how it relates to the more general reformation of religion and moral authority that marks human history. Why do people convert? Why are some cultures so resistant to Christian appeals while others eagerly embrace the faith? Does the widespread incidence of conversion to Christianity and other world religions suggest convergence in the development of religion, ethics, and authority across cultures?

A comparative understanding of these questions promises to be of interest not only for anthropology and sociology but also for comparative politics, ethical history, and, indeed, our understanding of the civilized world. My intent in the present chapter is to outline something of this broader context. I will emphasize two points from the start. First, though most of the discussion in these essays centers on Christianity, my remarks here are necessarily broader. For the sake of comparison, I speak of Christianity as a species of world religion and seek to explore the differences between world religions and the other great family of religions referred to, much too generally, as traditional.

When used in too bipolar a fashion, the categories of traditional and world religion are simplistic and reinforce certain prejudices of the putative rationality of the modern world and the irrational traditionalism of the premodern. Most such modernist generalities are of little analytic value. But one distinction made between traditional and world religions points to something quite real: only a few religions have shown great success in propagating themselves over time and space. This seemingly obvious aspect of their sociohistorical distribution, we shall see, has had some not-so-obvious influences on the ideals and social organization of the faiths we call world religions.

Situating Christianity in history and in relation to other world religions, the discussion which follows departs somewhat from anthropological research on Christianity and indeed from the focus of some of the other essays in this volume. Recent anthropological work has emphasized that Christianity in a cross-cultural context is far less socially and ideologically monolithic than the "salvationist orthodoxy" (Schneider and Lindenbaum 1987:4) often attributed to it. Contrary to essentialist characterizations of its meaning, Christianity has demonstrated a remarkable ability to take on different cultural shadings in local settings (Badone 1990; Boutilier et al. 1978; Saunders 1988; Schneider and Lindenbaum 1987). The Christian message of individual salvation, for example, has often been marginalized or recast to meet communal needs; elsewhere, believers have been inclined to seek blessing not simply for otherworldly ends but also for "the fulfillment of needs and desires in the here and now" (French Smith 1988:42; cf. Schneider and Lindenbaum 1987:2).

Having refuted the myth of the Christian monolith, however, we must not fall into the converse error of extreme cultural particularism, so thoroughly deconstructing Christianity as to conclude that it is really no more than a congeries of local traditions. Though, in absolute terms, all religions and all cultures are unique, the faiths we know as world religions show striking continuities over time and space. This simple fact indicates their social and moral distinctiveness.

The second point I should stress is that my discussion of the social science commentary on conversion is inevitably selective, designed less to provide an exhaustive history of ideas than to highlight a few recurring themes. Central among these are the nature of the world religions and the source of their remarkable social power. Wherein originates the capacity of these religions to challenge the received lifeways and moral imagination of people incorporating into the civilized social order? Is it a function of the association of these religions with imperial or hegemonic powers? Is conversion, then, first and foremost a colonization of consciousness? Alternately, or in addition, do Christianity and the other world religions embody a cultural logic uniquely adapted to the challenge of the civilized macrocosm?

Whatever our answers to these questions, this much is clear: human history...